Privilege
Copyright © 2011 by Shamus Rahman Khan
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Khan, Shamus Rahman.
Privilege : the making of an adolescent elite at St. Paul’s School / Shamus Rahman Khan. p. cm. — (Princeton studies in cultural sociology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-14528-0 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. St. Paul’s School (Concord, N.H.)—History. 2. Boarding schools— New Hampshire—Concord—History. 3. Boarding schools—Social aspects—New Hampshire—Concord. I. Title.
LD7501.C822K53 2011 373.742´72—dc22 2010021520
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America
For my parents, whose enduring love and support I have had the privilege of enjoying all of my life
Privilege
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my life have I seen my father read a novel; his favorite music is still from the Indian movies of his childhood or the songs that greeted him when he arrived in Detroit in the early 1970s. He would not know Bach from Schoenberg. My father’s reply to this cultural scolding by a New England blue blood was prescient: “Someday, my kids can have all the books they want.” My parents were justifiably proud of what they had achieved, and the cultural tastes they would never develop they would instill in their children. We ate at fine restaurants. At one of these restaurants I saw my father, raised a Muslim, take his first sip of wine. The snobbery that always stung me—waiters handing me or my brother a wine list instead of my parents, who were clearly paying for the meal—seemed not to bother them. Compared to their achievements, these slights were trivial.
Attending an elite high school was the ultimate mark of success in our bourgeois suburban world, and I was determined to do so. My parents were not enthusiastic about my leaving home, but they knew the advantages of boarding school. Perhaps thinking of their own lives, they respected my desire to head out on my own. St. Paul’s was on my tour of New England boarding schools. I didn’t know anything about the place, but during my visit I was seduced. The school is a truly stunning physical place—one of the most beautiful campuses in the world. Luckily, I was accepted.
I was unprepared for my new life. The shock of moving from poor rural New York to rich suburban Boston was repeated during my first days at St. Paul’s. This school had long been home to the social elite of the nation. Here were members of a national upper class that went well beyond the professional circles of my suburban home. Children with multiple homes who chartered planes for weekend international trips, came from family dynasties, and inherited unimaginable advantages met me on the school’s brick paths. My parents’ newfound wealth was miniscule compared to many at the school. And in my first days, all the European tours, violin lessons, and private schooling could not buy me a place among many of my classmates. I was not comfortable around this new group of people. I instead found a home by recessing into my dorm, away from the entitlements of most of my classmates.
For my entire time at St. Paul’s I lived in the same minority student dorm. But as I became more at ease at the school, as I began to understand the place and my classmates, I also began to find ways to fit in. Upon graduating I was elected by my classmates to represent them on the
board of managers of the alumni. While this respect of my peers made me proud, I was not sad to be moving on. I had purposefully not applied to the Ivy League schools that my classmates would be attending. St. Paul’s was a world I had learned to fit into but one that I was not particularly happy in.
The source of my discontent was my increasing awareness of inequality. I kept returning to my first days: both my surprise at my minority student dorm and my discomfort among my elite classmates. The experience remained an aggravating curiosity. Why was elite schooling like a birthright for some Americans and a herculean achievement for others? Why did students from certain backgrounds seem to have such an easy time feeling comfortable and doing well at the school while others seemed to relentlessly struggle? And, most important, while students were repeatedly told that we were among the best of the best,2 why was it that so many of the best came from among the rich? These were all questions about inequality, and they drove me away from the world of St. Paul’s. But learning more about inequality also brought me back.
Democratic Inequality, Elite Education, and the Rise of the Meritocracy
No society will ever be equal. Questions about inequality are not “Is there inequality?” but instead “How much inequality is there, and what is its character?” Inequality is more tolerable if its character is perceived as “fair.” Systematic, durable inequalities3—those where advantages and disadvantages are transferred from generation to generation—are largely unacceptable to our contemporary sensibility. We are unhappy if our poor always remain poor or our rich seem to have a stranglehold on wealth. We are similarly uncomfortable with the notion that ascribed characteristics like race help determine our life chances. Levels of inequality are slightly more contentious. Some of us do not mind large gaps between rich and poor if the poor receive a livable income and the rich are given the capacity to innovate to create more wealth. Others feel that larger and larger gaps generate social problems. The evidence seems to show that inequality is bad for societies.4 Following these data, I am among those who believe that too much inequality is both immoral and inefficient.
to such struggles, treating poorer students as if they were the same as rich ones. This is in stark contrast to students who are legacies (whose past family members attended the college), athletes, or members of a minority group. Though students from these three groups are provided special consideration by colleges, increasing their chances of admission, poorer students are afforded no such luxury.10 They may claim otherwise, but colleges are truly “need blind” in the worst possible way. They are ambivalent to the disadvantages of poverty. The result is a clear class bias in college enrollments. College professors, looking at our classrooms, know this sad truth quite well. Put simply, lots of rich kids go to college. Few poor ones do.11
As I discuss inequality I keep returning to education, and elite education in particular. This is no accident. One of the best predictors of your earnings is your level of education; attending an elite educational institution increases your wages even further.12 Schooling matters for wealth. If the competitive nature of the college application process is any indicator, it’s clear that most Americans know this story quite well. Given that increases in inequality over the past fifty years are in no small part explained by the expansion of wealth, and elite schooling is central to becoming an elite, we need to know more about how elite schools are training those who are driving inequality.
Before casting elite schools as the villains of our story, we must pause. For all my criticism of elite schools as bastions of wealth, we must remember that these are not simply nefarious places, committed to producing the rich. And as far back as 1940, James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University, declared it our national duty “to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.” Conant imagined creating a Jeffersonian ideal of a “natural aristocracy” where the elite would be selected on the basis of talent. At his core Conant was a Tocquevillian, hoping to strike a blow at the heart of the undeserving elite and replace it with what he imagined made America great: equality of conditions.13 Over the past sixty years elite schools have made attempts to shift away from being bastions of entitled rich boys toward being places for the talented members of all of society. Many accepted black students long before they were compelled to do so by the pressures of the civil rights movement. They similarly transformed into places that do not just “allow” women; they created the conditions in which they could thrive. These schools’ religious foundations
led them to imagine that they were not simply places for the education of the advantaged but places that lead to the betterment of society.
In no small part this leading has meant attempts to create a meritocracy of talent. Things like the SAT—a test seeking to evaluate the “natural aptitude” of students and move away from favoring their wealth and lineage— emerged out of the ideal.14 The test was imagined and instituted by Henry Chauncey, a descendant of Puritan ministers who arrived in this country in the 1630s. His family were firmly part of the American WASP establishment; they were among the very first students at the Groton School, one of the nation’s premier boarding schools, and Chauncey himself was a graduate of and later a dean at Harvard. Through the SAT Chauncey sought to level the playing field and in the process transform elite schools and thereby the elite. The paradox of open inequality shows how this project has been both a tremendous success and a tremendous failure. Who is at elite schools seems to have shifted. But the elite seem to have a firmer and firmer hold on our nation’s wealth and power.
One reason is that there is nothing innate about “merit.” Though we tend to think of merit as those qualities that are abstract and ahistorical, in fact what counts as meritorious is highly contextual. Many scholars have pointed to the ways in which our definitions of merit change over time, depending on cultural and institutional contexts.15 The term “meritocracy” was coined by Michael Young. In the 1940s Young had been asked by England’s Labour Party to help institute and evaluate a new educational system meant to allow all young Britons the opportunity acquire the best education, should they be able. Young soon became cynical of the kind of technocratic approach to human character that such an education seemed to promote. Struggling to think of a word to describe this new system, he played off “aristocracy” and “democracy.” Rather than “rule by the best” (aristos) or “rule by the people” (demos), this system would establish “rule by the cleverest people.”16 Though we often think of the word as something admirable, Young invented it to damn what he saw as the cold scientization of ability and the bureaucratization of talent.
At its core, “meritocracy” is a form of social engineering, aimed at identifying the talents of members of society so that individuals can be selected for appropriate opportunities. In the case of the SAT this means evaluating particular mathematics, reading, writing, and vocabulary skills and using them as indicators of academic ability.17 This move toward meritocracy has
sought to decollectivize formerly valued attributes and instead individualize new ones that are “innate.” Rather than accept students because they manifest a character that revealed good heritage, this new system would look beyond the trappings of society and reward people’s inherent individual talents. When meritocracy began to make its way into college admissions, then dean of Harvard admissions, Wilbur Bender, worried, “Are there any good ways of identifying and measuring goodness, humanity, character, warmth, enthusiasm, responsibility, vitality, creativity, independence, heterosexuality, etc., etc., or should we care about these anyhow?”18
As Jerome Karabel has shown, many of these traits were used as proxies for elite status.19 Bender, the child of Mennonite parents from Goshen, Indiana, was no elite WASP. But he expressed concerns that echoed throughout the world of elite education in the 1950s and 1960s: what might happen to the elements of character that so marked the old American elite? Would the rise of the meritocracy mean the death of the old elite?
With “merit” we seem to have stripped individuals of the old baggage of social ties and status and replaced it with personal attributes—hard work, discipline, native intelligence, and other forms of human capital that can be evaluated separate from the conditions of social life. And the impact of the adoption of this approach has led to rather contradictory outcomes. It has undercut nepotism. It has been used to promote the opening of schools to talented members of society who previously were excluded. But it has also been used to question policies like affirmative action that take into account factors other than performance on select technocratic instruments. It has been used to justify the increased wages of the already wealthy (as their skills are so valuable and irreplaceable). And most important for me, it has obscured how outcomes are not simply a product of individual traits. As I shall argue, this meritocracy of hard work and achievement has naturalized socially constituted distinctions, making differences in outcomes appear a product of who people are rather than a product of the conditions of their making. It is through looking at the rise of the meritocracy that we can better understand the new elite and thereby some of the workings of our contemporary inequality.
In exploring St. Paul’s I will show how the school produces “meritorious” traits of students. We will see how these attributes are developed within elite settings that few have access to. What seems natural is made, but access to that making is strictly limited. Returning to my first days at
XXXVI
IN the meantime Mr. James Dodson had hurriedly left the precincts of the court. He had made his way headlong to the refreshment buffet of the Brontë Hotel.
“Chrissie,” said the eminent philosopher, “I want something that in the quickest possible time will make me blind to the world. And as soon as I am blind to the world I want you to put me in a cab and send me home.”
“What’s up, Jimmy?” said the lady at the buffet, betraying a lively curiosity. “It isn’t love, because I know by experience that you are not built in that way.”
“A lot you know about it,” said the philosopher hoarsely. “You think because you have thrown me over twice and I have not said a word about it, I haven’t got any feelings at all. You are wrong, Chrissie. If you touch me in the right spot I have to squeal just like anybody else. I want to knock my head against that beer-engine until I can’t feel anything more. And why do you think I want to do that?”
“Ask me another, James Dodson,” said the siren. “But for whatever reason you want to do it, I know very well it is not love.”
“Well, if it is not love,” said Mr. Dodson, “I don’t know what the name is for it. Here is a chap I have known seven years, who was nothing to me at first, who was not the kind of chap a fellow like me would take up with, who has been found guilty of doing things—not one thing mind you, but two—and although he has been found guilty, I say and he owns up himself and he has just been put away for six months’ hard labour—the whole business makes me feel —makes me feel, Chrissie, as though I want to commit a murder.”
“Whatever you do, Jimmy,” said the siren, who was genuinely alarmed, “you must keep off brandy. You are absolutely off the
square. I can’t make out what is the matter with you; I should have said you would have been the last chap in the world to let go like this.”
“So should I, old girl,” said Mr. Dodson. “I don’t recognize J. D. in this affair at all. The fact is, J. D. never has recognized himself in his dealings with that poor lunatic. But there has come to be something about that chap that is more to me than my own flesh and blood. If it isn’t love I don’t know what it is; yet why it should be love I don’t know. As you know, old girl, I don’t believe much in religion as a general thing, but it has seemed to me lately that that chap was just a saint in disguise. And now they have taken him from me—put him away in gaol—to hard labour—and he deserves it too—and—and, old girl, it has kind of knocked the bottom out of my little world altogether—and—and I feel that I shall never be able to believe in anything again.”
“Steady, old boy,” said Chrissie with an ample yet robust sympathy. “I don’t like to see you let go.”
“I don’t like it either,” said the philosopher whitely. “But I feel just now that I must either let out a little or go mad. One thing is dead sure; I mustn’t go back to the office at present. If I do I am certain to murder Octavius.”
“Jimmy,” said Chrissie, with matronly reserve from behind the buffet, “if you like to bring that ring back again to-morrow I’ll wear it.”
“You give me something that will put me to sleep,” said the philosopher hoarsely and with wild eyes. “Anything—I don’t care what—as long as it does it soon.”
In the next moment, however, he had gone forward again. It was as though an irresistible impulse had driven him.
“Why—why,” he said, peering into the great and luminous eyes of the man who had issued from the portals of the gaol, “can—can it be Luney?”
He who was addressed in this singular manner replied by taking a hand of the speaker’s in each of his own, and by saluting him upon the forehead.
